The internet once again knows what time it is, after ICANN took over responsibility for the Time Zone Database.
Earlier this month, the long-time custodian of the database David Olsen took its FTP server offline after being threatened with a copyright trolling. The lawsuit had been initiated by astrology software vendor …

Britons spend one in every 12 waking minutes on the internet, causing advertisers to splurge great wads of cash on online marketing, according to an internet advertisers' trade body.
UK internet use minute by minute UK internet use minute by minute. Source: UKOM, July 2013
According to a report from the Internet Advertising …

Time Warner Cable Inc has agreed to completely sever ties with its parent company Time Warner Inc, which will receive a tasty payout from the spin-off.
A one-time dividend, payable immediately prior to the separation, will be paid to Time Warner Cable stockholders of $10.27 a share for a total of about $10.9bn. Time Warner will …

Disaster recovery is complicated and usually expensive. It comes in many forms, and many companies mandate a minimum of off-site backups for various reasons, from regulatory compliance to risk aversion.
Disaster recovery planning is considered to be part of standard IT best practices today, but which solutions are appropriate …

The formal launch of Greenwich electronic Time (GeT) was delayed by 13 minutes and 14 seconds today in a move that doesn't bode well for the new global Internet time standard. Despite having three Caesium clocks at their disposal, the GeT consortium still couldn't kick-off the briefing on time at the Royal Opera House in London' …

Open ... And Shut
Apple has become the world's most valuable company by filling us with childish wonder at (and ravenous lust to buy) its Jesus phone, but Facebook seems sure to surpass Apple's $350bn-plus market cap by providing the social fabric for all internet traffic. But first the social giant needs to figure out mobile. And fast.
It's not …

Product Round-up
If the rumours are to be believed, Apple and Microsoft are both developing "smartwatches" - wrist-worn gadgets that do rather more than simply display the time.
The Apple rumours kicked off after smartwatch-pioneer Pebble’s Kickstarter campaign generated kilometres of column-inches, and with Cupertino on the case, it wasn’t long …

US vice president Al Gore has backed a scheme for America's youth to create a millennium time capsule in cyberspace. Instead of using a pick and shovel to turn over the sods, the National Internet Time Capsule Science Project will let high school graduates of America's "Class of 2000" bury a time capsule on the Web instead. It …

Review
The Belkin Play Max has ideas far above its station as a plain old wireless internet router. Its extra song’n’dance talents include a Nas service for USB-attached drives, a media server and a BitTorrent download assistant. But all this depends on your setting it up as your main connection to the internet. And I stumbled on some …

Management at Hamilton Rentals has carried a £10m MBO from the rental outfit’s parent, 2e2.
The Hamilton Rentals name has a long history in the channel before being absorbed by Compel in 1996. The Hamilton Rentals brand continued at veteran reseller Compel, which was itself absorbed by 2e2 last year.
The management at the …

Google may be "99.9 per cent" certain that it will leave China, but Twitter will instead move into the Middle Kingdom.
Eventually.
Or so Twitter creator Jack Dorsey told a New York gathering sponsored by news site ReadWriteWeb. According to a report in Tuesday's New York Times, Dorsey was asked by Chinese artist and activist Ai …

Google publicised its new browser Chrome with a 38-page comic book. It's a gift to satirists, and already, our inboxes are buzzing with slightly less saintly interpretations.
Here's a selection. Naturally, the altruistic nature of the operation gets a bit of a bashing:
As does the, er, "end to end" nature of the gambit: …

Part one
The Gated Kingdom guarded by the mobile industry is the last great frontier for Silicon Valley to crack.
These vast, vertically integrated companies handle much of our communication – and they make pots of money. But standards are set by closed-door cabals of equipment vendors and operators and move at glacial pace, locking out …

Mexican authorities have put the kibosh on Yahoo!'s plans to beam millions of text, video and picture messages into outer space.
The main stumbling block for Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) was that internet giant Yahoo! wanted to set up its space-age digital laser apparatus on the ancient Pyramid …

Digital music site Amie Street has been bought by Amazon, but the founders of the user-fueled music service aren't abandoning their efforts to bring social networking to music lovers.
"We've been straddling two spaces for years now — streaming and download," Amie Street cofounder Elias Roman told The Reg. "We've basically been …

Why are people "moving" their FON routers into the lake? It's because of a clever idea - or so it seemed: let people "earn" 15 minutes of free Internet time on the FON Wi-Fi network by watching adverts.
A FON user, Claudi, kicked off the protest on the FON discussion boards:
I just realized that fon allows 15 minutes of free …

German boffins at the famed Fraunhofer Institutes - developers of mp3 audio compression, among other things - are now working on another critical technology. To wit: bearings covered in ultrahard coatings of artificial diamond.
A plastic bearing cage, coated in artificial diamond by the Fraunhofer IWM Slick as ice.
The …

OAP über-brand Saga has today dusted off its own social network aimed at the over-50s.
Saga Zone has been in beta for four months, and so far boasts 13,000 members. It's "a new online community where you create a whole new social network of friends and easily stay in touch from the comfort of your home". There's nothing to stop …

A chain letter being distributed via email today bizarrely predicts that the Internet will stop working on Monday.
The email claims that the so-called "Year 2003 Bug" was discovered on 23 February, and that essential Internet equipment will be triggered to stop working on the 030303 date.
According to the chain letter "No one …

Sports fans will have to wait at least ten years to view the Olympics on the Net, thanks to the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
In a World Wide Web shrinking exercise, sites will not be allowed to carry video and audio of the Olympic Games until they can guarantee that only surfers in the same country as the site have …

We had an interesting conversation with Peter Cooper-Ellis, the guy who ran product management at BEA Systems from the time it acquired WebLogic and who's now taking on a similar role with SpringSource. Obviously, in the wake of the Oracle acquisition, it's not surprising that Cooper-Ellis jumped ship.
But in making the jump to …

The newspaper industry has brought its financial troubles on itself, according to the chief executive of Craigslist, the company that has been accused of decimating the newspaper industry's advertising business.
Jim Buckmaster told weekly technology law podcast OUT-LAW Radio that his business was not responsible for publishers …

MySQL Con
The battle to own MySQL is over and Oracle executives are fanning out to woo open sourcers, but MySQL luminaries have mobilized to win the hearts and minds of DBAs and developers.
MySQL father Michael - Monty - Widenius and leading MySQL architect Brian Aker spoke separately at the annual MySQL Con in Santa Clara, California, …

eDonkey is off to the knackers' yard, after a New York court ruled that the peer-to-peer (P2P) site enabled users to swap copyright material illegally. eDonkey’s owner, New York-based MetaMachine, is ponying up $30m to settle a copyright suit brought by six record companies. MetaMachine has another P2P network, called Overnet, …

Clockwatch
We may have been little premature yesterday in declaring that America survived Sunday's Daylight Saving Time (DST) switch unscathed.
Reports from Reg readers and elsewhere reveal the so-called "Y2k7 bug" threw up a variety of problems, mostly transitory and largely on the scale of minor irritation.
Among the systems exhibiting …

Stob
Are you a Web 1.0 duhveloper in a rut? Is rich web codery passing you by in Internet time? Do you nibble on the ASCII Alphabetti Spaghetti of server-side processing, while younger, feck- (careful) and talent-less colleagues slurp the UTF-Eightti Vermicelli of client-side coquetry?
You do? I knew it. But don't let it get you down …

MySpace should set aside some of its revenues into a pool to compensate musicians, says an industry group.
"We think they should pay," a spokesman for British Music Rights, a group representing songwriters, publishers and performers, told us today.
At a MusicAlly music industry seminar this week, MySpace's European VP rejected …

easyEverything has changed its cybercafe tariffs to charge punters more in busier periods. Rates were previously £1 per hour to use one of the terminals in the company's rapidly expanding Internet cafe empire. But a representative of the company said demand had grown so strong that a "yield management" system was implemented …

Microsoft attempt to use the courts to force to US academics has failed. The company wanted access to interviews conducted by professor David Yoffie of Harvard and professor Michael Cusumano of MIT for a forthcoming book on Netscape, Competing on Internet Time: Lessons from Netscape and its Battle with Microsoft. The interviews …

The WSJ is reporting today that Softbank has decided to sell off bits and pieces of its vast publishing empire. The reason, according to the report, is because Softbank sees bigger opportunities investing in Web ventures rather than traditional businesses like paper magazines and events such as Comdex. According to the Wally, …

It was five years ago today...
Is the email watch to the 1990s what the flying car was to the 1950s? Trumpets are blown, predictions made, expectations raised:
Apple, Swatch to make e-mail watch
By Mike Magee
Published Monday 12th July 1999 07:41 GMT
A Swiss site is reporting that Apple and Swatch have launched a watch that allows you to read your email. …

An executive at the Mirror's ISP, ic24, has taken a lie detector test to prove that the service really is free.
ic24's marketing director, Jill Playle, underwent the polygraph test to prove that the new "After Eight" campaign - providing free Net access between 8pm and midnight, Monday to Friday and
9am to 5pm at the weekend …

WinXP IE6 spells death for Doubleclick - and a boost for MSN?
IE6 will not monster our cookies, says Doubleclick
Mention the word Doubleclick, and you're likely to arouse some strong feelings. Brian Uecker is typical of the large number of readers who wrote in this week on this subject:
It just keeps getting better.
First …

Analysis
Having attempted to buy Palm Computing from its current owner, 3Com, and failed, it should come as no surprise that Apple interim CEO Steve Jobs might opt for an easier target: Handspring, the company formed last year by Palm founders Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky to create Palm-based consumer products. That at least is what …

Microsoft yesterday asked a federal judge in Boston to compel Michael Cusumano of MIT and David Yoffie of Harvard to hand over tapes and transcripts from their interviews with Netscape and AOL executives. These form the basis of a book entitled Competing on Internet time: lessons from Netscape and the battle with Microsoft. The …

Professor Franklin Fisher many times states the obvious and contributes little that is new in his direct testimony, which was prepared in September before the trial started. It would have been more valuable had he prepared it more recently. He reiterates that Microsoft has monopoly power with Windows (which Microsoft obstinately …

Letters
eDonkey got its, er, ass kicked in the New York courts last week. And the RIAA owns its front page. And any visitor's IP addresses, it reckons. So, what to do, for the determined downloader?
> For instance, offer PC lessons to an elderly neighbour, preferably very old and very deaf in return for some internet time.
Or use his …